CNN’s current headline, as I write this: “President Bush takes part in commemorative tree planting.” This is listed as a “Live, developing story.”
As I’ve mentioned previously, Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural is publishing an excellent collection of long out of print Victorian-era novels and short stories. I just finished reading one of them, a neglected novel of suspense and the supernatural, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery.
In my recent post on the camera obscura, I discussed the optical illusion produced by so-called anamorphic images, i.e. images which only appear normal from a particular point of view. One can readily understand such images from the point of view of geometrical optics, but I thought I’d go a step further and show how a little geometry can be used to construct your own simple anamorphs. In this post we discuss the simplest form of anamorphic image — one constructed from piecewise planar images — and when my sanity returns I’ll contemplate doing posts on other, more complicated distortions.
I haven’t stopped by Ramsey Campbell’s official website for a while, but it was updated since I last saw it with an introduction that talks about why he writes horror and why it is a worthy literary pursuit. It’s a great defense of a genre that shouldn’t need a defense; to quote a highlight:
An old saw states that horror and pornography are the only kinds of fiction that seek to produce a physical reaction. Presumably whichever human prune originated this twaddle was never made to laugh or weep by fiction. I think there’s nothing at all wrong with art that causes us to feel, but I maintain that horror fiction can address the intellect as well. I don’t want to scare people out of their wits; I’d rather scare them in.
I highly agree with this assessment, and I like to think that I’ve been pushing a similar argument in some of my previous horror posts. For instance, Lovecraft and his contemporaries were drawing in significant amounts upon the scientific discoveries of their era (relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution) to unsettle, by exploring what might be considered to be unpleasant consequences of our increasing understanding. I’ll have more to say on this in a few days, after I’ve collected my thoughts a bit more…
Update: Via Trudi Topham, I’ve found that Campbell is currently, and for a couple of weeks, answering questions at the Pantechnicon Forums. If you’ve ever had a question for a horror master, here’s a good chance to ask it!
So I’m standing in line at the security checkpoint at the airport, and not even a long line at that (10 minutes?). Suddenly a gruff older man starts complaining to his wife next to me. He says, “If they had just taken that shoe-guy off the plane and shot him, we wouldn’t have to go through all this.” His wife asks, “What?” “The shoe bomber,” he clarifies. “If they’d just taken that shoe bomber right off the plane and executed him, we wouldn’t have to put up with all this security.”
It’s amazing how many wrong statements and assumptions are contained in this one little “argument”. Suffice to say that it’s hard to imagine that people who are willing to kill themselves and destroy an airplane they’re flying in, feet first, would be deterred by the threat of execution.
If you want to understand the simple-minded political discourse in the U.S., you don’t necessarily have to look much farther than the views of some of its citizens. And this guy was complaining about a ten-minute wait!
Just a quick note: I’ll be heading off to give another talk tomorrow, so my posting may be light for a few days again. I’ve got some cute stuff I’ve been working on, though, so if I have time, I’ll sneak in a post!
I broke out another of my skydiving videos to post on YouTube the other day. This one, below the fold, is what is known as a “speedstar”. Most formation skydives are meticulously planned to be “slot perfect”: that is, every skydiver has a very specific place in the formation, as in the jump I blogged about previously. A speedstar, on the other hand, is all about everybody getting together as fast as they can! Nobody leaves the plane together: everyone piles out single file and then rushes to the formation. In the video below the fold, we were doing a speedstar with 10 people (a “10-way”) and we planned two points…
Just an entertaining blog stats observation: a few days ago I noticed that my blog stats started to really spike upwards. This completely confused me at first, as all the hits were appearing on my semi-old post on elephant intelligence. It took me a little while to realize that the post has apparently migrated to the top of some Google search results. For instance, if you type ‘elephant paintings hong‘, you get my post as the top entry! Typing ‘how do they teach the elephants to paint‘ will get me on the first page.
I’m glad I was relatively thorough in my discussion of the topic, which hopefully merits its inclusion high in the search pages. There’s a lesson here: don’t be too sloppy with a blog entry; you never know where it will end up!
When I wrote my ‘speed of light’ post, I had to do a lot of searching to find Fizeau’s original paper. Fizeau, as I mentioned, produced the first terrestrial measurement of the speed of light, using a rapidly rotating toothed wheel to break a light signal into continuous pulses whose speed could then be estimated. Since I’ve managed to find, after some effort, Fizeau’s paper, I thought I’d do the physics community a service and post it in a more easy to find place: my blog!
Via Respectful Insolence, I found a wonderful web tool that allows you to rate the amount of cussin’ you do on your blog. I rated a pathetic 1.7%:
I need to swear more, for fuck’s sake…
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 